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TheBigH wrote:That's not really an option. I have too many files to rename them all, it'd take me forever. Besides, why should I have to? Why can't PCman do what it's meant to do?

It is doing exactly what it is designed to do. Linux file name conventions don't pay any attention to extensions and can be any length. Linux applications pay attention to the content of a file. A space is used by Linux to delineate a break between file names unless it is either escaped by a \ or entered as a %20. You can also use PCManfm to move the files, however they are named, by drag & drop. The only thing you can't do is to simply double-click on a file to open it if you use a space in the name.

That seems like more of a misfeature actually. There's plenty of reasons why you might end up with lots of files with spaces in their names, so it's unhelpful to say "Just don't have spaces in file names, the computer's right and you're wrong, so nergh". In my case it's because I've saved a list of mobile phone contacts from a friend's phone that was dying, and they've come out as over 200 individual files with names like "John Smith.txt" or "Jane Doe Home.txt".

It seems to me that an intelligent file manager should be able to interpret a group of space-separated things as a single file name if it can't successfully interpret them as a single word command followed by command line arguments.

If PCmanfm won't do what I want I may need to remove it and install one that has this simple, sensible ability. Are there any good ones that can do it?

It could also be the version of PCmanFM which you have vs. the one in Ubuntu. Just for giggles, I tried in Thunar 1.2.3 (Debian Wheezy Xfce) with a file with multiple spaces in the name, and it opened mousepad with no problems.